How to Read

by Eckhard Gerdes

For too long, our educational system has oversimplified the practice of reading while pretending that only one method works: Read as fast as you can, from beginning to end, in a straight line, without skipping anything. The fastest reader is the best reader and gets the gold star and the certificate for free ice cream! This, of course, punishes deliberate, careful students and booklovers who delight in the process and incorporate what they read into their everyday lives. The dominant method of reading works for simple linear texts, but it is by no means the only way to go about reading and excludes many other types of texts. In How to Read,, veteran novelist, editor and educator Eckhard Gerdes reveals 81 different approaches for reading, opening up new horizons that restrictive educators have been blocking from view for far too long. This innovative guidebook will enrich the experience of textuality for young and old readers alike.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Books About Books

110 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Eckhard Gerdes is an American-born novelist & editor. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He's author of fifteen published books of fiction:
Projections ['86 Depth Charge] a novella
Ring in a River ['92 Depth Charge] a novel
Truly Fine Citizen ['89 Highlander] a novel
Cistern Tawdry ['02 Fugue State] a novel
Przewalski's Horse ['06 Red Hen] a novel
The Million-Year Centipede, or, Liquid Structures ['07 Raw Dog Screaming] a novel
Nin & Nan ['08 Bizarro] a novella
My Landlady the Lobotomist ['08 Raw Dog Screaming] a novel
The Unwelcome Guest and Nin and Nan ['10 Enigmatic Ink] two novellas
Hugh Moore ['10 Civil Coping Mechanisms, '15 Heroinum] a novel
Three Psychedelic Novellas ['12 Enigmatic Ink] three novellas
The Sylvia Plath Cookbook: A Satire ['12 Sugar Glider] a long short story
White Bungalows ['15 Dirt Heart Pharmacy ] a novel
Marco & Iarlaith ['18 Black Scat] a novel in flash fiction
The Pissers'Theatre ['21 Black Scat] a novel

two volumes of poetry:
23 Skidoo! 23 Form-Fitting Poems ['13 Finishing Line]
Blues for Youse ['15 ATTOHO]

a play:
'S A Bird ['13 Black Scat]

a work of creative nonfiction
How to Read ['14 Guide Dog]

His work reflects experimental technique, sometimes ignoring time, space, or causality in the service of stories of individuals struggling to transcend fear & limitation. His recent work has been associated with the Bizarro Fiction movement, of which he is one of the leading proponents.

Reviews of his work have appeared in Rain Taxi, Notre Dame Review, Dream People, Review of Contemporary Fiction & elsewhere.

Eckhard Gerdes is the editor of The Journal of Experimental Fiction, issues of which are usually Festschrifts on a single writer (e.g. John Barth, Raymond Federman, Harold Jaffe). He has also written on modern & post-modern literature for Review of Contemporary Fiction, Hyde Park Review of Books & other magazines.

Gerdes has been awarded an &NOW Award for Innovative Fiction and has twice been the recipient of the Richard Pike Bissell Creative Writing Award for excerpts from Przewalski's Horse. The Million-Year Centipede was selected as one of the top ten mainstream novels of 2007 in the annual Preditors & Editors Readers Poll. He has also been a finalist for both the Starcherone & the Blatt fiction prizes for his unpublished manuscript White Bungalows. For Cistern Tawdry Gerdes was nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in the Fiction Category. He lives near Chicago. He has three children and five grandchildren.

Reviews

[Carrie (brightbeautifulthings) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd little book that offers approaches to reading outside the obvious cover-to-cover, such as excerpted, extra-textual (reading about the text), cross-referential (seeking patterns), etc. I think it could be very useful for approaching experimental authors like Lance Olsen and the kind found in creative writing programs all over the country, or for people entering graduate school who are looking for more effective ways to approach research and the staggering amount of assigned reading. Books like Theories of Forgetting, for example, might better be understood working outward from a central theme or idea rather than front to back (assuming you can even tell which side is the “front”–good luck with that). I also think it’s important to seek out theory like this on how to effectively engage with texts instead of relying completely on what, for example, social media says we should do. (I love our book community, but I think a lot of people on Tumblr could benefit from this type of reading. There are lots and lots of ways to read books.)

However, like a lot of experimental fiction, it’s also a bit pedantic, a bit snobby, and a bit preoccupied with wordplay, so much that occasionally the message gets lost. I won’t pretend to know what half of Gerdes’s jokes mean. Structurally, it’s oddly straightforward, matching each type of reading alphabetically with each other type. (You don’t HAVE to read it that way of course; you could read it any which way, which is the book’s point. But I was surprised to see it structured just like AnY oTheR boOK). The match-ups have increasingly diminished returns though, and I would have been more interested to see Gerdes choose some of the most relevant types and fully develop examples about them, i.e., show me what he means instead of telling me and making nonsensical quips about it. (But what the hell do I know about this kind of writing? I wrote my review from beginning to end and fully expect you to read it that way!)

I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.